The idea of dynamic service placement has been proposed in the area of cloud computing and overlay networking. See, for example, J. Famaey, et al., “A latency-aware algorithm for dynamic service placement in large-scale overlays,” IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, 2009, pgs. 414-421 (June 2009); and Q. Zhang et al., “Dynamic service placement in shared service hosting infrastructures,” IFIP International Conference on Networking 2010, pgs. 251-264 (May 2010). These approaches, however, do not consider the specifics of cellular networks such as tree-like backhaul topology, heterogeneous capacities of edge/core servers, and user mobility.
Next generation cellular networks utilize more intelligent edge devices such as eNodeB which enjoys greatly enhanced computational and analytics capability in order to serve the mobile users' certain application and service requests at the edge rather than at the core network as in traditional cellular network systems. Existing solutions usually select a set of applications and services and load them at the edge devices. If a mobile client requests a pre-loaded application or service, the edge device will provide the service utilizing local computational resources (e.g., CPU and memory). If the requested service or application is not loaded in the edge device, the request will be forwarded to the core network for execution. Selecting a proper set of applications to load is important for fully realizing the benefit of using such edge devices.
Thus, improved techniques for placing applications and services at cellular network edge devices would be desirable.